More Bloody Clerihews

Following their widely ignored 2019 anthology The Call of the Clerihew, George Szirtes and Andy Jackson make another doomed attempt to interest the world in the ridiculous four-line biographical poetic form known as the Clerihew. Invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) when he was a schoolboy, the Clerihew is a childish and pointless anti-Panegyric consisting of flat-footed, Hudibrastic quatrains designed to lower the tone and cut everyone down to size. Some have called the Clerihew a mini-epic in four lines. Others have called it the Limerick’s smarter cousin. WH Auden once wrote an entire book of the bloody things.

This new selection of short, satirical and often scurrilous poems throws together poets like Michael Rosen, WN Herbert, Jacqueline Saphra, Tom Deveson, Mark Totterdell, Adam Horovitz and Anne Berkeley as they take down various actors, architects, chefs, comedians, detectives, puppets and philosophers